Acts of Appearance

2015 - Photography (Photography)
60.96 x 40.64 cm each

Acts of Appearance is an ongoing series by Gauri Gill consisting of lush, large-scale color portraits of the residents of a village in Maharashtra, in Western India, which is known for making Adivasi masks. Adivasi people are part of the tribal groups population of South Asia. Instead of requesting the likenesses of gods and demons, Gill asked the residents—including the master mask-makers Subhas and Bhagavan Dharam Kadu, their families, and fellow volunteers—to make masks that portray their own lives. Instead of consecrating gods or demons as per local tradition and lore, the masks become self-portraits and exercises in the symbolic representation of lived reality, across dreaming and waking states. Then, she painstakingly orchestrated medium-format portraits of the makers wearing their masks in everyday settings, such as in Untitled, (16) and ( 32) . Without uttering a word, the resulting images unfurl narratives that become vast commentaries on time, leisure, work, pleasure, hopes, dreams, fears, and futures. Gill’s photographs occupy the same threshold between human and spirit as the Boas photographs enacting the dance of Hamatsa (a Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous community), and depict the frozen moment of an elaborate performance to be a powerful—and politically consequential—thing indeed.

Gauri Gill is interested in the social contract of photography. Her photographs propagate expression to subaltern existences within rural Indian states, even as they critically denote a fundamental imbalance in their own existence, at once accredited to Gill as well as the cultural, social, and political statements of the collaborators that she photographs. Her practice operates on a surface level that opens up onto an ephemeral, vital set of relationships, both through and beyond her social engagement with the communities, individuals, and practices that drive her photography to hold much more than what it directly portrays. In doing so, her works inquire about the circulation of expression from the margins of contemporary life, Gill’s work forming an estuary of repressed voices that leaks outward into the discourse of the greater art world. The Western structure of the singular artist as genius disintegrates against these somewhat anonymized, though strident sources. The sense that there is an expanded, unwieldy network of individuals at play throughout her works is present in their sometimes overflowing serial quality: almost all of her series are ongoing, and overlap each other.